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Friday, August 26, 2016

The myth of Muslim tolerance for Jews and Christians

A couple of nice stories are demolished in this book, What we have instead is a barbarian dominance of a largely civilized Roman province that had largely absorbed a population of Germanic barbarians by Christianity.

More egregious is our myth of Islam protecting and transmitting Greek learning. Nothing of the sort. that was accomplished by the Greeks themselves who translated texts into Arabic.

Histories judgement of Islam just got far worse. There is nothing to redeem about a religion that crystallizes ethnic hatreds around one language and one religion. That is why it was the blueprint for Nazism. There will always be others and pograms. .

There is a widely held belief that in Spain, during the European Middle
Ages, Islam, Christianity and Judaism co-existed peacefully and
fruitfully under a tolerant and enlightened Islamic hegemony. Dario
Fernandez-Morera, associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at
Northwestern University in the US, with a PhD from Harvard, has written a
stunning book that upends this myth.

The myth itself has been a comforting and even inspiring story that has
underpinned the so-called Toledo Principles regarding religious
tolerance in our time. It has buttressed the belief that Islam was a
higher civilisation than that of medieval Europe in the eighth to 12th
centuries and that the destruction of this enlightened and sophisticated
Andalusia should be lamented.

The great Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, a century ago, saw it
that way. US President Barack Obama and The Economist magazine have both
very recently cited Muslim Andalusia as evidence that Islam has been a
religion of peace and tolerance. In short, the myth of Andalusia has
been a beacon of hope for working with Islam in today’s world with a
common commitment to civilised norms.

This vision was spelled out in Maria Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain
(2002) and reinforced by David Levering Lewis’s God’s Crucible: Islam
and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 (2008). But it has deep roots. Edward
Gibbon, in his famous 18th-century history of the decline and fall of
the Roman Empire, wrote in glowing terms of the 10th-century Umayyad
caliphate in Spain as a beacon of enlightenment, learning and urban
living, at a time when Europe was plunged in bigotry, ignorance and
poverty.

As someone who has long taken this vision for granted, it came as a
considerable shock to me to discover that the conventional wisdom is
quite unfounded. In The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise,
Fernandez-Morera systematically refutes the beguiling fable. The picture
he draws is starkly different from the conventional one, troubling in
what it reveals and compelling in its arguments.

If we are to satisfactorily resolve current disputes about Islamophobia
and the future of Islam as a world religion, this book is required
reading. International reviewers have greeted it as a desperately needed
corrective to delusion and propaganda. That will invite pushback from
those who either remain committed to the myth or believe it is too
important a beacon to allow it to be extinguished.

However, Fernandez-Morera argues trenchantly that we must shake off the
sense of the superiority of Islam to medieval European culture. He
makes the point, for example, that, given Islam’s antipathy to graphic
art and music, had Europe been Islamised in the 8th century, we would
never have had Gregorian chant, orchestral music or opera. No Bach,
Mozart, Beethoven or Verdi. No Caravaggio, Michelangelo or Titian.
Ponder that, at least as a thought experiment.

He shows that the Muslim invaders of Spain in the 8th century did not
arrive as a higher civilisation conquering Visigothic barbarians. They
arrived as barbarians intruding on a strongly Romanised, Catholic and
materially sophisticated culture. As other scholarship has shown, the
Arabs in the 7th and 8th centuries were barbarian invaders every bit as
much as the Germans or Bulgars in Europe. They plundered, enslaved and
sacked from the Middle East across North Africa and eastwards to Central
Asia and India. As the great Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun would put it
in the 14th century, war in the name of religion was integral to Islam.

Secondly, Fernandez-Morera argues that Islam was not the vehicle
through which classical Greek learning was preserved, as is so often
claimed. It was chiefly Constantinople that archived and protected the
patrimony of Greek antiquity, philosophical, medical and mathematical.
The Arabs acquired all this through Greek Christian scholars translating
the classics for them. Greeks from the east and Christians in the west
later revived such learning for themselves. Meanwhile, the rise of Islam
had disrupted the flow of trade and ideas between the Greek east and
the Latin west, thus harming rather than fertilising European
civilisation.

Even these background theses will strike many readers as controversial,
but they are only the beginning. The real thrust of Fernandez-Morera’s
critique of the myth of Andalusia is that Islam in Spain, far from
setting a high bar of tolerance, was characterised by plunder,
domination, the harsh application of sharia law, the persecution of
Christians or Jews who openly avowed their non-Muslim beliefs, and the
violent suppression of ‘‘heresies’’ and apostasy within the Muslim
community.

He also points out that the Christian and Jewish communities tended
towards dogmatism, enclosure against the other religions and the fierce
persecution of both heretics and apostates. Andalusia has been extolled
as a convivencia, he remarks, but in reality it was what he
dubs a precaria co-existencia between the three monotheistic religions
that eventually dis­integrated.

Chapter four, The Myth of Umayyad Tolerance: Inquisitions, Beheadings,
Impalings and Crucifixions, and chapter five, Women in Islamic Spain:
Female Circumcision, Stoning, Veils and Sexual Slavery, reveal what has
been airbrushed from history. The Moroccan Muslim feminist Fatema
Mernissi and others have laboured to argue that the sexual slaves in
Andalusian harems were somehow ‘‘free’’ women. Fernandez-Morera draws
attention to the considerably greater freedom of women in Christian
Spain, by contrast, in terms of everyday outdoor work and access to
political power.

The myth of Andalusia has been based on neglect of primary sources and
selective adulation of worldly Muslim rulers, as if they were
representative of the clerical ulema and Muslim masses. In fact, as
Fernandez-Morera shows, both mullahs and masses tended to bigotry and
anti-Semitism. There were anti-Semitic pogroms every bit as violent and
irrational as those in Christian Europe. And many Christians were
expelled from Muslim Spain.

Among the many shocks to my settled beliefs in reading this book was
learning of the atrocities committed, publicly and privately, by Muslim
rulers I had long seen as models of enlightened despotism, notably Abd
al-Rahman I (731-788) and his descendant two centuries later Abd
al-Rahman III. Both committed abhorrent deeds of torture and murder.

Far more shocking is Fernandez-Morera’s documentation of the harsh sharia
law in Spain under the Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence,
something endorsed even by the celebrated 12th-century philosopher from
Cordoba, Averroes (Ibn Rushd). It was neither pluralist nor ‘‘secular’’.
It offers no model at all for what we might want or do now in civil
society.

I learned things reading this book that I wish were not true, but the
documentation is voluminous and compelling. There are occasional errors
of fact and some surprising omissions — no discussion, for example, of
the great library of Cordoba or of its other public amenities in the 10
century — but the overall impact is profound. His book will surely run
into hostility, but Fernandez-Morera is a formidable scholar.

The classic works of Patricia Crone or John Wansbrough on the origins
of Islam are the best comparison with what Fernandez-Morera has
achieved. They demonstrated that the Koran as a canonical text dates
from long after the traditional death of Mohammed and the hadiths
(sayings attributed to Mohammed) were overwhelmingly just made up by
storytellers long after he was gone.

In Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam, Crone argued that the
traditional story of Mecca as a great spice-trading centre where
Mohammed founded Islam from whole cloth (‘‘revelations’’) does not stand
up to scrutiny. The actual history of early Islam and the traditional
religious ­account of it diverge radically. Yet this extraordinary
finding has never sunk in. It is, understandably, resisted strenuously
by Muslim believers and an academic establishment that makes a living
out of writing about that traditional story.

Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam and books like it are vital works. The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise
is one of these books. Rather than accepting conventional or
politically correct views about either Islamic Spain or the rise of
Islam ‘‘in the full light of history’’, read these probing works of
historical scholarship.

We do need the ‘‘cultural secularism’’ that Menocal and others think
they can point to in Muslim Andalusia. We do need to find a way for
those who still adhere to the old religions to live in reasonable
harmony. We should want a tolerant, cosmopolitan order here and abroad.
What we cannot do any longer is take Muslim rule in Spain as our model
for accomplishing that laudable goal. We need to invent something new.
There is no Andalusian golden age to emulate.

Paul Monk is a consultant, writer and speaker. He is the author of Opinions and Reflections: A Free Mind at Work 1990-2015.

1 comment:

Unfortunately, the more Muslims we import, the more terror events. It's the nature of the religion. It's not going to change, because, as their numbers grow, so does their push for Sharia Law. There's no way to soften their prime directive: "Convert or kill all non-believers." One look at Europe shows you our future. Journalist Daniel Greenfield wrote, “When you turn on the evening news and see a running death toll, it’s happening more and more often. The new brand of Islamic terror only needs one thing… Muslims. Lone wolf terrorism operates off the existing Muslim population in a particular country. The bigger the Muslim population, the bigger the risk. The FBI or other law enforcement agencies cannot monitor even a fraction of the Islamic settler population sympathetic to terror. As the Muslim settler population in the country increases, the number of cases will grow.” (Source: Right Side News, Stop Lone Wolf Terrorism by Ending Muslim Immigration, August 2, 2016)

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